


supernova

by k_aro



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: (in a manner of speaking), Angst, Blindness, Eye Trauma, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Imprisonment, Post-Dream SMP Disc War Finale, Solitude, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Swearing, Sympathetic Dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:01:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29029842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/k_aro/pseuds/k_aro
Summary: “No, Captain, trust me, that wasn’t crazy. I’ve been crazy before, and that’s not what it sounds like.”Feltock’s mouth was open. “Saint Birgid-who-weeps-rivers, boy, what does it sound like then?”“Quiet,” I said. “Mostly very quiet.”—Traitor's Blade,Sebastian de Castell
Comments: 5
Kudos: 65
Collections: dream-centric discord comp.





	supernova

**Author's Note:**

> this one's to you, ghost dream server :)
> 
> (the fight is changed up a little; tommy and tubbo fight before punz + the others come to rescue them because they're like "well if we're gonna die we'll at least die fighting"; go with it)
> 
> i have not had an eye injury that would cause blindness/semi-blindness/vision loss; i am, at most, basing it off of my experiences as someone with terrible eyesight, and what the internet says. cheers.
> 
> tws: suicide, suicidal ideation, abandonment, isolation, derealization. heed the archive warning and tags.

_Smash._

Needless to say, Dream hadn't expected the kids to fight back this well. Sure, they'd been in multiple wars—and in multiple wars against Dream himself—but that didn't mean that they'd get so... good. Least of all for them to get close enough to smash his mask.

Shit, he really needs to get a better material for it. Especially if it smashes on one really well timed hit.

Especially especially if it—shit, he needs to get the shards out right now. Or else he's never going to—fuck. He can still hold them off, maybe, if he just keeps his shield over his face, and they don't see, and all he can see _(all he can focus on)_ are the swarming black spots, the itchiness, _god,_ he wants to fucking claw his eyes out—

"You should've paid me more, Dream." The deep, ominous purple sound with a clear line, the sound of the bottom of the universe: again, and again. _Multiple people._ He almost wants to laugh. There's no point anymore, Tubbo and Tommy can run away and he wouldn't know, or, he couldn't stop them, what the fuck would he do—

He wants to rub, but that would be _weakness,_ that would be showing that he needs comfort, that he needs to _live._ So he tries to blink it away, water washed with blurriness turning faces and colours into shapes through a translucent pool window.

It passes in a flash, passes in voices and stances and opinions that he can't hear, he can't _process_ , and he's throwing his stuff, everything, stuff he tries to hide away in his pocket but so long as he keeps his mask, so long as he can keep a hand conspicuously pressed to the mask. It digs a little deeper into his skin, but he couldn't care less.

Metal clinks against his wrists, heavily light handcuffs being tugged on. "Come on, Dream," says the voice of his childhood friend. He should feel some kind of relief, maybe, that it's Sam and not—he doesn't know.

Pulled away, and the floor is... moving up. Well, there goes his only escape. More pulling, before it stops.

A beat.

"What are you waiting for?" Coldly demanding. _Well—I can't, I don't—_

He shrugs on a passive arrogance instead. "Couldn't I just run away if you don't hold onto me?" He jingles his free wrist. "You went through this whole production and you're just going to leave me hanging like this?" He allows his lips to fall into a familiar curve, cruel and delighted.

Sam... _growls._ It's irritated, not a note he thought his friend's (friend?) voice could carry, but there it is. "I should kill you right here. Lucky for you that they still need you." Dream feels the chain yanked forwards, and he stumbles behind it, _well, better than blindly following some green shape in a world of green._

He feels the lick of water against his shoes before he is unceremoniously dumped into a boat. His lungs press against his back press against hard wood, water splashing every now and again, a cold brand that doesn't stay.

The rolling movement he came to accept slams to a stop, and he's pulled up, yanked away. His shoes scuff on wooden ground he's used to (but not used to enough, fuck, what had he become?) in an eerily silent town.

His breaths are too loud.

It's a long trek before they come to hit against stone, and another stop. It's cheesy, maybe, that he can feel the light chill of the air, the bulk of the black mass weighing over him.

_It's blurry, but it's so built in his mind, the blueprints producing a structure grown out of blood soiled ground—imposing, blackstone, a monstrous creation with an obsessive creation. Grotesque in its twisted splendour. Some part of him wishes he could see it clearly one last time._

"Nothing to say?" And now it's Sam's turn to be cocky, but he can't even enjoy Sam's snark.

He just chuckles.

Soft and gentle, _tired_ and gentle. What can he say, when his vision tricks him, when the lines of black are smudged like charcoal drawings. He pulls up from the wealth of confidence he built for himself, leans back a little. "Oh, sure. Only that I'll be escaping sooner or later."

Sam snorts, and it almost _—almost—_ feels like a moment of relief, before he gets nudged forwards, trident in Sam's hand a warning.

Into the nether, out the nether, in beds and half-deaths, through the halls and halls of commissioned obsidian and blackstone, greys and purples and blacks and those _fucking_ spots in his vision, shit, he can't focus until—a wall of lava.

He wants to chuckle again, a breath of air rather than actual amusement. He should probably try to escape.

He gets sent over on a stone bridge and now, a lake between the world and him.

* * *

It's _just_ light enough to not be dark. That is the first thing Dream notices.

Sure, he appreciates the drama of a nice lava waterfall—who _hasn't_ made one just to see how badass it looks? But truly, it's such bad lighting. And any of the other lights aren't nearly enough to fight back against the consuming darkness, the borderline pulsing purple.

Or maybe sitting in a box of obsidian with a wall of lava makes him _think_ that it's pulsing. Or maybe it's just his vision. Fuck, one would've thought those half-deaths would be enough to reset his condition, but those voids in his vision don't go away.

Sometime between his imprisonment and probably the end of the world, Sam brings him a lectern. Specifically, Sam brings Tommy, who tells him to write. It feels cruel, unnecessarily so, but it's not as though the kid would know.

So, he has to scribble out stuff while dots of the page are blackened, like they were burned, but no middle ground between page and non-page. Simply a hole.

And a clock. One that he stares at when he's not writing, that moves between baby blue and indigo. Time passes so slowly.

Raw potatoes, too. Dream knows he devised it, so it is probably a consequence of his actions, but he can't help but feel a little... hard done. Maybe.

Or maybe not. He takes to crunching down on them, and not thinking about the starchiness. Crunching down on them, and watching the gold hand of the clock travel through the hours. Crunching down on them, writing in his books, endless books he needs to write and fill up. Word, and words, and words. And potatoes.

Thoughts, too. _I think, therefore I am._ Reconstructs situations in his mind, rewrites the results. Moves the pieces in different ways, looks at the sky differently. But he has not seen the sky in a while, so most times, it is just dark purple. Fills in the crater of L'Manberg, brings back Spirit. Lets go of the discs, rebuilds the community house. What had he wanted?

He does not remember the prime path anymore. _It is just oak and spruce,_ his mind yells. What had he become?

Some days, he just lies on the ground and stares at the pulsing purple. Stares at the encroaching holes, stares at them _because_ they are holes, stares and them and hopes that they grow larger. Hopes that he can watch them grow larger. It'd be something to do.

Other days, he takes off his mask. Closes his eyes. Lets himself feel, once, maybe. Cool temperatures too warm to be numbing, warm temperatures too cold to be comforting. _The world ends in ice or fire,_ says Robert Frost. The world has never ended for Robert Frost, clearly.

* * *

_Every now and again, Dream indulges himself._

_Maybe ripping his fingers against scrabbling obsidian is too little, maybe the incessant movement of a clock is too much. He's not allowed luxuries, usually, so he thinks he can be forgiven, just this once._

_(He says this many times, knowing that it will never be 'just this once'.)_

_He leaves a day off, when he knows he's not getting any visitors (which, when he thinks about it, is most days) and Sam doesn't have his eye on the chat bar (which, when he thinks about it, is not many days)._

_It's a kind of meditation, maybe, as he sits in front of the orange curtain._

_He holds his hand out delicately, like he is being asked to dance. Because, he thinks, in some ways he is being asked to dance. He is both the asker and the askee. And his response is barely ever yes._

_He allows his fingers to dip forwards, first, like getting your hand too close to a flame just to feel the first licks of ash. It burns, high and bright. The first few times, he jerked away. He does not jerk away anymore._

_He plunges the rest of his arm in, and he can't help it (what a disgusting creature), but he screams. He howls, allows himself to scream and yell as his nerves sizzle and smoke, because this is eons of obsidian walls._

_The rest of him falls after, and he is sinking before he breaks surface again, gasping for smoke filled air. The brightness is enough to override his holes, if only for a breath._

_He feels fresh, after, even though he feels the phantom linger of burns. He feels like he has scrubbed his face, ripped off the dirty skin and become new. But soon enough, he's itching to be clean once more._

_He does not stop until Sam stops him._

* * *

The world does not change, until it does.

The world ends, not in fear or ice, but on a MondayTuesdayWednesdayThursdayFridaySaturdaySunday when Rachel gets off the plane and Dream gets captured. But that is only the beginning of the end of the world.

No, it ends when— _je pense, donc je suis._ To be, or not to be.

Sam is delivering his weekly rations of potatoes. At this point, Dream does not eat them. It is less painful to fall, after all, than munch mindlessly at another potato. No, it is not the potatoes that are of interest. It is of the fact that Sam is cut in half.

That his face is a hole, that his body is a hole, that the background is a hole, and all he can see is colours melded like the Impressionists. _Art is not about a faithful recreation of reality,_ it is suggested. _Art is about the suggestion of reality, the blurriness of it. Who is to say that the soft curves of Aphrodite reflect life as well as the smears of paint that represent an apple?_

_Ceci n'est past un rêve._

It is something different, at least. "Sam," he says curiously, his voice unusual to his ears. He has not heard it speak except to scream. Nobody visits him.

The warden does not go back immediately. "No, you have not been pardoned."

"Ah," he waves his hand. "Psh. Nothing of the sort, not interested in that." He hums a little, considers the potatoes. They have been reduced to brown puddles, at this distance. "Have you always been halved?"

"Excuse me?"

"Halved. You know, split in two." He is sure Sam is two, because there is nothing else green (well, except for himself) in the prison.

"Is this a threat?" The warden pulls out something beautifully luminescent in the deep shade. His trusty trident.

Dream chuckles. "I would never." He walks a little closer to Sam, one last time. Green is a nice colour.

Sam presses him backwards, leaves him at the back of the cell. Dream does not move towards the green mass with holes anymore. "I don't eat the potatoes, you know," he calls, right before the blob disappears into the purple.

* * *

Sam does not visit him that week.

Or maybe he does, and he doesn't notice.

* * *

Will he rot? He hopes he will, maybe if he doesn't immolate himself, he will finally mold and grow over like the potatoes under his bed.

There is no difference between the purple and the black holes anymore. Not even between the clock and the black holes, or the books and the black holes.

There is a theory about stars that get too big. About black holes that get too big. About anything that gets too big.

A rat does not fall from a fifty story building onto mattresses and explode in a festival of gore and innards the same way an elephant does. A small black hole does not collapse on itself as it consumes, one that has already taken too much is its own undoing.

A miniature star does not explode with fervour, consuming other plants and stars, the way a giant one does.

A shame he cannot see these things.

**Author's Note:**

> wow, i uh. i really banged this out in one evening and said "off you go!"
> 
> this turned out wayyy more theoretical than i had intended. oops. hopefully this still technically works under blind/broken.


End file.
